The present invention relates to the field of devices adapted to assist in loading artillery ammunition; more in detail, it relates to a storage system for artillery ammunition and to an associated computer program.
It is known that on warships and submarines artillery ammunitions are stored in magazines which are typically located below deck or on a deck typically positioned near the ship's bottom.
The artillery ammunition must be picked from the magazine and transported to the piece of artillery, where they can then be fired.
One problem which is encountered when handling artillery ammunition is caused by the weight and dimensions thereof. In fact, such ammunition may weigh up to several hundreds of kilograms, which makes them essentially impossible to manipulate by hand, thus requiring the use of special handling devices.
Moreover, the pieces of artillery carried by ships and submarines can traditionally fire munitions of different types, characterized by different calibre, length, explosive power and warhead type. Therefore, there is a need for having available, on the ship's deck used as an ammunition magazine, devices or systems capable of handling munitions of different natures.
Although known magazines can contain ammunition of different types, they however suffer from some limitations. When a firing action is taking place, especially a fast one, as is typical, for example, in the course of a battle, the munitions are moved from the magazine to a hoist and then up to a piece of artillery in a not wholly automatic manner, and when the type of ammunition must be changed a manual action is still required.
Furthermore, if a munition is not fired, traditional storage systems will not allow it to be automatically unloaded.
The storage systems known in the art usually include structures, called drums, in which the artillery ammunition are inserted, ready for being sent to a piece of artillery. The artillery ammunition drum resembles, as far as its function is concerned, a larger-scale copy of a typical drum of a revolver pistol, and operates in a similar manner, although artillery ammunition are not fired directly from the drum, being only picked up therefrom, one piece at a time, following one rotation thereof.
The storage systems known in the art do not allow the drum to be partially loaded with ammunition during a firing action. When the drum is empty, the firing action must be interrupted and the drum must be loaded again. During both offensive and defensive firing actions, this turns out to be particularly dangerous because the warship or submarine is substantially placed in the condition of not being able to fire and of needing to replace the piece of artillery for which ammunition is about to be loaded onto the drum with other pieces of artillery which, due to their different firing power or position on the ship or submarine, might be inefficient or even incapable of hitting the target(s) (e.g. because they are being covered by the foredeck or by the tower).